I liked this book. It reminded me of so many ideas that we have discussed in this course, and some of them nearly forgotten. It was as though I were hunting out the concepts, much like our narrator was hunting for his building, and when I discovered them I was elated in my realization of them, much like he was when he discovered his building. It was a way of bringing to life those abstract ideas that, until now, were only floating around in the corners of my mind, and had not found a conception to pin themselves to: a seemingly realistic use of unrealistic abstractions.
On pages 55 and 56 our narrator describes a group of homeless people across the street from the coffee shop where he is enjoying his 'short cap:' "I started seeing a regularity to the pattern of their movements...It was complicated though: each time I thought I'd cracked the sequence, one of them would move out of turn or strike out on a new route." This is an example of the clinamen, in the pattern of the moving people, suddenly broken by one person who moves different from it.
Another part of the novel that reminded me of an idea we’ve discussed is page 96:
“I imagined looking on from overhead, from way above the city, picking out Naz’s people, each one with a kind of tag on them, a dot like police cars have to help police helicopters pick them out. I imagined looking down and seeing them all—plus me, the seventh moving dot, my turning and redoubling etching out the master pattern that the other six were emulating.”
This passage reminded me of something we had discussed that I could not quite place, much like the memories that plague this narrator. I realized that it was part of our discussion on Meillassoux: the seventh case, “a seventh side to the die that emerges as the die is thrown; a pure emergence that does not ‘pre-exist’ its own existence” (notes 1/22/2009). Our narrator, and indeed these new memories that have emerged to him as a result of his accident, are an example of the seventh case, which has emerged into his mind without existing prior to the accident.
There are also very obvious references to the simulacrum that Baudrillard discusses in his paper “The Precession of Simulacra.” Throughout the novel the narrator creates for himself representations—perfect representations—of certain experiences, places, and memories, for the sheer pleasure of doing so. On page 67 the narrator states: “I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my money. I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again.” The house itself was a haven for the narrator’s “re-enactments of events that hadn’t happened but which, nonetheless, like the history in Kevin’s pop sing, were on the verge of being repeated” (134).
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